The Godforsaken Daughter (3 page)

Henry managed to reciprocate the smile, grateful for the man’s reassurance. But he knew, as he walked away, that in the troubled city of Belfast, with its relentless succession of shootings and bombings, a woman missing for a few hours would figure low on the RUC’s list of priorities.

He returned home in the early hours, finding the house eerily quiet without her. All the warmth and comfort he’d taken so much for granted: gone like a puff of breath in winter. He went immediately up to the attic to check on the suitcases.

No, they were still there, gathering dust from the last vacation. Relief swept over him like a blessing. So she hadn’t left him.

He sat down on a beanbag and stared at the cases. Connie’s: the biggest of the set. She loved clothes, and always insisted on taking most of her wardrobe with her. So many happy holidays had been packed into that blue Samsonite. Their most recent, on the island of Crete the previous August.

He saw them on the terrace of Hotel Hyperion, sipping Metaxa as the sun sank over the Mediterranean. Connie’s blonde hair burnished bronze in the evening light; her easy smile, eyes bright with happiness. Her pale fingers clasping the glass, savoring each tiny sip of the Greek brandy. His butterfly. She loved butterflies. Loved seeing them in summer. That delight in them mirrored so keenly in her own life. So hungry for adventure. Trying out new things: jobs, hobbies, hairstyles. Flitting from one experience to another, eager to soak up the thrill of it all.

“Why don’t we move here, darling? Wouldn’t it be heaven?”

Henry, the realist. Always the realist: “Yes, it would be lovely, but not practical, as you—”

“Oh, stop spoiling the moment. Just say ‘yes’ and let me dream. I’m tired of Belfast. The shootings, the bombing. We’ve no ties, really. We’re as free as birds. We could live anywhere in this big, bright, beautiful, scintillating world.”

“Hmmm
. . .
You see the world as bright and beautiful because you’re on holiday. Unfortunately, I’m under contract. My patients need me.”

“You’re not indispensible! I expect there are mentally ill people in every country. You’d always find work.” She’d taken a larger sip of the brandy. “Only trees stay in the one place all their lives. And we’re not trees.”

“I’m sorry.”

“‘Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits me and is most becoming?’”

“Oh, stop quoting that morose poet!
Now
look who’s spoiling the moment.”

“Sylvia Plath was
not
morose. She was a realist, trapped by others’ expectations. A bit like
me
.”

She’d gotten up then and slammed down the glass.

“Connie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“I’m going for a stroll.”

“On your own.”

“Yes, on my own. I’m not a toddler. And I wish you’d stop treating me like one.”

Is that why she’d done this? Just to show him? Had he been too restricting?

The doctor put his head in his hands.
Maybe I should have listened more. Maybe I should have given her the same ear I give my patients.

He got up and went downstairs. Clear, almost palpable in his mind, the image of her rising from that table at Hotel Hyperion and stalking off.

He went immediately to the writing bureau. Opened the locked drawer and dug down through their shared collection of personal papers: birth, marriage, graduation certificates, bank statements, until he found the object of his search.

He drew out the passport and leafed through its pages, hopeful. But, alas, it was his own face that stared back at him.

He reached back into the drawer, a feeling of dread taking hold. His fingers made contact with bare board. He pulled the drawer out as far as it would go, and hunkered down to get a closer look.

But the back of the drawer was empty. Connie’s passport: gone.

Chapter three

I
n the time it took Martha Clare to rise and dress, Ruby had the tea made, the table laid, the mother’s favored cup and saucer in position, and her chair cushion plumped, ready to receive her.

On the table: a cream sponge Ruby had made that morning, perfectly risen and finger-light springy, due to the care she’d taken in beating sufficient air into the mixture. Baking came as naturally to her as breathing. As a child she’d watched her mother, and as a girl had helped her aunt Rita, who used to own a cake shop. The farm work had taken her away from all those domestic pursuits, but now she was rediscovering, as with her knitting, the joy of those long-neglected skills. And it pleased her that her foray into farming hadn’t diminished her talent in the kitchen.

Martha Clare, a brittle-boned sexagenarian, frail as a festive meringue, sharp as a hacksaw when her blood was up, sighed her way down the stairs and proceeded unsteadily to the table.

She waited for her daughter to pull out the chair—“
Might put my elbow out. Them chairs are too heavy for me these days. Have to watch my bones. Dr. Brewster said so.
” Ruby knew the mantra well and was on guard like a lady’s maid, obeying a set of unspoken commands just to keep the peace. Being indoors with the mother day after day was a fresh trial to be gotten through, a burden to be borne.

Martha gathered her cardigan about her and settled herself. The garment seemed much too big for her, but Mrs. Clare, always on the slight side, had lost even more weight following her husband’s death. Vincent Clare had taken care of everything outside the home. The farm business was his world, the domestic sphere hers. But with his passing, Martha was forced out of her comfort zone and into a world of lawyers and paperwork pertaining to his affairs and their sixty-plus acres of land. The stress of it all had taken its toll, robbing her of sleep and the desire to eat.

Lately, however, all that grief and despair had turned to anger—anger at the injustice of it all. She was angry with Vincent—barely a month into his sixty-eighth year and rarely ill in his life—for caus
ing her such grief by exiting so early. She was angry at Ruby, for she’d been his favorite. She knew that Vincent would have wanted Ruby to carry on the farm. He’d said it often enough. But his death was a betrayal too far.

So she took her revenge on both, by selling off the dairy herd and renting out the land. Not only dishonoring her dead husband’s wishes but depriving the daughter of the only world she knew.

“Did you have a good sleep, Mammy?” asked Ruby, pouring the tea, stewed to the color of oxblood, just the way her mother liked it.

“Enough sleep? I never get enough sleep. Why d’you think I have to lie down during the day?” Martha, her usual cantankerous self, held out her plate for the slice of cake. “That looks like one of your auntie Rita’s?”

“No, Mammy, I baked it this morning.”

“Is that so? Looks very like one of Rita’s to me
. . .
always great at the sponges, Rita. She learned it from me, of course. Not that she’d ever give
me
any credit. She wouldn’t have had that bakery business if it wasn’t for me.”

Ruby said nothing. She was getting tired of defending herself. A lull was better than a row.

Mrs. Clare sliced the cake into tiny pieces, as was her way. “Well, what have you been doing with yourself?”

“Finishing off the tea cozy. The cupcake one I started on Monday. It’s very nice. But I won’t show it to you till it’s ready.”

“You’re still at that, then?”

“Mammy, there’s something I want to ask you.”

“What’s that?”

“You know the way when Daddy was alive he always
. . .
he always give me twenty pound a week for me work on the farm.”

Ruby waited for the mother to fill in the blanks so she wouldn’t have to spell it out, but Martha just sat there, staring into the middle distance.

“Well, you haven’t give me any since
. . .”

“You’re not working on the farm no more, so why would I give you money? Besides, don’t you get my pension money every Monday?”

“But that’s for groceries. I’ve nothing left over for meself. For things
. . .”

“And what things would you need, Ruby? You don’t go out. You’ve no responsibilities. You’ve got your bed and board here—which is more than a lot of people have.”

“Did Daddy leave me anything in his will?”

The mother looked askance. “What kind of question’s that? Your poor father hardly cold in his grave and all you’re concerned about is how much money he left behind him.”

Ruby wished she hadn’t broached the subject. The atmosphere of calm she strove always to maintain around her mother was ruffled now.

An uneasy silence fell.

Ruby was seated in the carver chair at the head of the table. The one her father used to occupy. The chair that had forgotten how to hold her father now held his beloved daughter instead. She felt closest to him when she sat in that chair.

It looked out on the field where he died. The field her mother now decreed was cursed. Back in 1926, it had taken the life of Arthur Clare, Ruby’s grandfather. Killed in a tractor accident at only forty-two, when Vincent was ten. Ruby had sown a patch of flowers on the spot where her father fell. A memorial to both men.

So, as the mother nibbled on the cake and took tiny sips of tea, sitting in her own isolation, Ruby reran the images from that fateful day. As if putting herself through the misery of it time and time again would somehow heal the pain and bring her father back.

She recalled peeling potatoes at a basin on the table. Head bent over the task, stripping the skin from a King Edward with an old knife.

Something had made her look up.

That’s when she saw her father, just standing there out in the field, stooped like a question mark, studying the ground, a hank of baler twine in his left hand.

His cap had fallen off. It lay in front of him. A November wind was lifting his hair.
What’s he looking at? Why doesn’t he pick up his cap?

Suddenly, he toppled forward. As if pushed by a sharp gust. He didn’t use his arms to break his fall.

Something was wrong.

Ruby dropped the knife. She ran, crashing down on her knees beside him. But in the seconds between the knife falling and her knees touching the ground, he was gone. His ear pressed against the soil, staring into eternity, peaceful.

She screamed.

“Daddy! Daddy! Wake up!”

She’d heaved him over onto his back. Grasped his shoulders, leaned close. Shook him hard. “Daddy, Daddy, wake up!” The left sleeve of his jacket was caked in mud. The smell of it filled her nostrils. Tears fell from her face onto his. She gripped him more tightly through the rough tweed. But it was useless. He was dead. Father no more. Her protector: gone.

“Oh God! Oh dear God, bring him back! Please bring him back!” The words breaking from her throat got lost on the wind, carried away over the bleak hills and dales of Oaktree Farm.

A raven alighted beside her, transfixed.

But too late. Too late. God had already shut the book on Vincent Clare’s life.

“You’re not crying again, are you?” Her mother’s voice. A knife tearing into the sacredness of Ruby’s memories. “’Cos if you are, I’ll—”

“I wasn’t, Mammy. I think I have a cold coming on.” Ruby brought a hankie to her nose and feigned a sneeze.

“I was going to say: May and June are coming home this weekend. May rang this morning when you were out.”

May and June: the twins. Five years younger than Ruby.

May born one minute to midnight on May 31. Three minutes later, on June 1: her sister. The pair of them away in Belfast, working for Boots department store on Royal Avenue. May in the pharmacy department, doling out drugs. June on the Rimmel counter, doling out cosmetics. Yes, away in the city, but not far enough away for Ruby’s liking. The weekends they came home were torture.

She hated the pair of them, and flinched as she thought of them
now. Petite, rail-thin, and snooty in their stretch-stirrup pants and pointy high heels, clopping in off a late bus, clutching vanity cases and buckling the air with their censure.

“I hope our beds are made up fresh, Ruby.” May marching in first and up the stairs.

“Yes, I hope they are, Ruby.” June, echoing behind her, forever in her shadow: indebted to her sister for having braved it out of the birth canal first. “We know the smell of mildew, you know.” Heads bent over the twin beds, sniffing pillows. “Mrs. Hipple is very thorough. Changes our bedding twice a week. Doesn’t she, May?”

Mrs. Hipple, their landlady on the Antrim Road, was held up as a paragon of good housekeeping.

“Yes indeed, June. City people know about cleanliness.”

“I washed the sheets this morning.” Ruby, breathless from the stair climb, filling the doorway. “They’ve been drying on the hedge since morning.”

“Hmm
. . .
if you say so.” May, holding fast to her disappointed face. “God, have you put on even more weight?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Well, she hasn’t got any thinner, that’s for sure.” June chipping in, always siding with her twin, but never with Ruby.

“So you’ll have to change their beds,” Martha was saying now, eyeing her daughter, knowing the request would upset her. “And I’ll have another cup of that tea.”

“I changed them last weekend.” Ruby got up to refill the teapot. “And they only sleep in them for two nights.”

“Well, I don’t want no rows in this house. I want peace. So change them again and be done with it. They like fresh beds when they come home.”

Ruby sighed. Replenished the teapot and took it to the table.

“And there’s another thing I want you to do before I forget. In the attic. Been meaning to tell you, but it keeps going out of my head. And is it any wonder, given what I’ve had to suffer these past months? So I don’t need you complaining about your sisters or asking about a will.”

Ruby wouldn’t hear the end of “the Will Question” now. She wished her mother would just shut up and leave her alone. She longed to be free of Oaktree House, now that her dear father was gone. Yes, free of the house, her whining mother, and her grudge-bearing sisters. But there wasn’t much chance of that, with no money and two O levels.

Life behind the walls of a convent might be better after all.

“What
about
the attic?” she asked, exasperated.

“Did you say a decade of the rosary for your father this morning?”

“I always do. First thing when I wake up.”

“Good. He needs all the prayers we can say, to get himself out of purgatory.”

“I think Daddy went straight to heaven. He never did anything wrong in his life.”

“Nobody’s that good. Only saints go straight to heaven. Did you learn nothing from your catechism? Your father’s mother wasn’t a good one. I can say that now ’cos your father’s gone. So he’ll be in purgatory a good while, on account of her.”

Ruby had never known the woman; Grandma Edna had died when she was a baby. She was rarely talked about, and then only in hushed tones. To add to the mystery, there were no photos of her in the house.

“Why was she not a good one, then?”

Martha, still imagining her husband having the dross of his earthly transgressions cleansed in the purgatorial fires, looked at Ruby, distracted.

“Up in the attic there’s a case your father kept, belonging to her. A filthy thing, with a naked woman on the front of it. I wanted to pitch it out years ago, but he wouldn’t let me. So, I want you to go up there. Take it out the back and burn it, d’you hear me?”

“Why d’you want it burned?”

“You don’t need to know why. She wasn’t a good one: Edna Clare. Came from bad stock. One of them Romany soothsayers, who claimed she could see into the future and talk to the dead. She did the Divil’s work, in other words. Aye, I married beneath myself when I married your father. But he was
. . .
he was—”

Had the daughter been looking her way she would have registered the sudden pall of fear tensing the mother’s features.

But Ruby was staring past her, out the window. She set her mug down hard on the table.

“Who the hell is that? And what the hell is he doing in Daddy’s field?”

A tractor was driving into the field Vincent Clare had died in. The field her mother had promised Ruby she would never rent out.

“I forget his name. He rang the other day and asked about it and—”

Ruby pushed back the chair, her ire rising.

“You promised me, Mammy! You
promised
.” She jumped up and bore down on her mother, close to tears. “I told you: any field but that one. I
told
you.”

“Well, we need the money, and I own the land, and—”

Mrs. Clare didn’t get to finish because Ruby had taken off. Out the door, belting down the yard, scattering the chickens, raising dust. She arrived, panting, at the mouth of the field, shouting at the stranger to leave.

But the man tearing over the grass on the tractor, his cutting machine in tow, heard nothing. She caught up with him, swung round in front of him, and stood waving her arms.

The shocked stranger braked suddenly, the grille guard of the tractor a mere foot away from Ruby’s bibbed bosom.

“What the hell are you doing in this field?” She demanded, arms akimbo, face pink with anger. “Get outta my field this minute!”

The man killed the engine. “Jezsis!”

Ruby stared hard at him as he clambered down from the tractor seat. On the short side, shabby, wearing old trousers with the knees gone, held up with a set of frayed braces. His shirt could have done with a wash and he wore a cap pulled low over his eyes against the strong sun.

“Jezsis, I could’a kilt you there!” was all he said, shoving the cap peak off his eyes to get a better look at her.

“Get outta my field this minute!”

“You’re not Mrs. Clare?”

“I’m Ruby Clare, her daughter, and my father died in this field.” She pointed to the flower patch. “Right there! So it’s
not
for renting. Who are
you?
”